Not really. It wasn’t audacious in service of anything innovative. Haskell takes functional programming to the nth degree, scala tried to be an advanced Java for example better at concurrency.

Perl was an early dynamic (garbage collected) “scripting language” but no more advanced than its contemporary python in this regard.

It had the weird sigils due to a poor design choice.

It had the many global cryptic variables and implicit variables due to a poor design choice.

It has the weird use of explicit references because of the bad design choice to flatten lists within lists to one giant list.

It actually was the one thing you said it wasn’t - a good practical general language at least within web and sysadmin worlds. At least until better competitors came along and built up library ecosystems.